by Rorke Denver
Come on now all you young men, all over the world. You are needed more than ever now to fill the gap of a generation shorn by the war. You have not an hour to lose. You must take your place in Life’s fighting line. Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years! Don’t be content with things as they are. “The earth is yours and the fullness thereof.” Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities. Raise the glorious flags again, advance them upon the new enemies, who constantly gather upon the front of the human army, and have only to be assaulted to be overthrown. Don’t take no for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes. But as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.
Confronted with such eloquence, all I could think was, Where do I sign up?
Churchill believed that being a soldier in the British Empire was absolutely a requirement for being a statesman later in life. He described that process of preparation in a way that made total sense to me. To seek adventure, honor, and glory—all those things appealed to me. He, like me, felt a responsibility to share what he had been so privileged to learn.
Reading Churchill, I knew immediately that one day I would serve.
6
RAW MATERIAL
Of one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there. Eighty are just targets. Nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them for they make the battle. Ah, but the one: He is a warrior and will bring the others back.
—HERACLITUS
* * *
The platoon I took to Iraq, it was scary how well we knew each other. I knew how every one of them moved, how they breathed, how they smelled at night. It could be pitch black in the woods. We could be on night-vision. A guy got up and started walking around. It was just a silhouette against the darkness. I knew exactly who it was. Everyone in the whole platoon knew. We were running so hard, working so long, risking so much together, there was no way to have secrets in that group. We all knew whose crazy uncle was putting pressure on him. We all knew who was having trouble with his wife or girlfriend—and the one dumb bastard who was having trouble with both.
I wasn’t one of the boys. I was the officer. I had their lives in my hands and the weight of command. For a military unit, we had a fairly casual rapport. They didn’t call me sir. They didn’t call me Rorke. The might say “LT,” for lieutenant, or “Mister D.”
The senior Army or Marine officers in Iraq, that kind of thing made their skin crawl. They called each other by individual rank, even in private. We were not too particular about that detail. We had a nontraditional approach to our battle gear. Guys made individual choices. I wore a pair of Solomon assault shoes to run onto a target as opposed to Army desert boots. Another guy wore Oakley boots because he liked them. Someone else was wearing Nikes. Another guy had a hat on backward underneath his helmet. It was good luck for him. That would never fly in a regular unit.
We were obsessive about a thousand things—the condition of our weapons, the details of the mission plan, how we were going to keep everyone alive on a treacherous battlefield. We were deadly serious about war. But making ourselves comfortable in the small, individual ways we could—that could only make us better fighters and more confident men.
Desert boots or Nikes, LT or Mister D, I’m pretty sure the enemy wasn’t deciding whether or not to kill us based on those kind of details.
* * *
Every year, thousands of young men across America look into the mirror and see a future U.S. Navy SEAL. However the notion is planted—a TV report on SEAL adventures, a friend just back from war, a kick-ass score on a shoot-’em-up video game, or even a book in the mail—the question is always the same.
“Why not me?”
They come seeking excitement. They show up hoping to test themselves. They are drawn to the SEAL mythology. They want to be part of a consistently winning team. They may or may not already be serving in the Navy or some other branch of the military. But somehow or another, they’ve convinced themselves they just might have what it takes to be a SEAL.
And some of them are right.
In fourteen years of evaluating, training, and leading SEALs after becoming one myself, I’ve learned that it’s almost impossible to predict in advance who will and who won’t succeed. Often, they’re not the ones you’d expect.
We’ve had guys from Kansas who’d never seen the ocean become phenomenally talented SEALs. We’ve had Olympic-level swimmers who quit on day one. On one of my very first days as a SEAL training officer, we accepted a brainy kid from Michigan who was a master-level chess champion. He proved himself a brilliant tactician even when the battlefield wasn’t laid out in sixty-four light or dark squares. Then we rejected a future NFL star. He didn’t strike us as a real team player. Turns out we were correct.
Spend any time around SEALs and you can’t help but notice: We’re not all six-foot-three musclemen. We do have our share of jacked-up gym rats, but SEALs come in many shapes and sizes, and we like it that way. You can’t spot the SEAL just by glancing down the bar or across the mess hall. In any group of SEALs, there will be big dudes next to wiry guys, people from a variety of places and backgrounds. There could be a boxer from Oregon next to a coal miner from Pennsylvania next to a cowboy from Texas next to an astrophysics major from New Hampshire next to a Churchill-reading, California-born lacrosse player like me.
Most SEALs don’t talk a lot about why they became SEALs. Only recently did I ever ask Matt why he joined up. He ticked off four reasons. “The people, see the world, do unique things, and serve”—in that order. But I have noticed over the years some quintessential SEAL profiles, and they do keep coming up again. We have what I call the Smurf SEAL. Five foot five, he was a starting linebacker on his high school football team. But he knew he was every bit as tough as the bigger guys, and he proved it all season long. We have the Rough-Upbringing SEAL, who came out of South Boston or the ganglands of Los Angeles or the barrios of Houston, where being tough was just a way of surviving. Joining the SEALs was a healthier way to move his life forward. There’s the Brawler SEAL. A guy like that, you just know: If he weren’t here, he’d be in prison. Brawler SEALs aren’t pure antisocial thugs. A real thug would never have the focus or the discipline to meet our training requirements. There’s no one bad enough to stare down thirty, forty, or seventy SEAL recruits enforcing our code of conduct.
Someone we’ve seen a lot more lately is the Gamer SEAL. They’ve spent an inordinate amount of time playing first-person shooter, blast-’em-up games like Call of Duty or Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell or SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs or whatever’s in beta test now. These gamers have gotten a taste of virtual warfare. They want more action-packed adventure than even the best games provide. I just have to remind them: “You realize, in our line of work, we don’t get twenty lives.”
Then there’s the Ivy League SEAL. They’re the Rhodes scholars, the straight-A honors graduates, the military academy standouts. At some point they say to themselves, “I could make a killing right now on Wall Street, but I want something more meaningful.” Military service, especially joining an elite military organization like the SEALs, appeals to them. These Ivy SEALs are a key part of our officer corps. But they have to convince the other SEALs they aren’t here just to give their high-gloss résumés some military spit-polish.
And don’t forget the Legacy SEAL. In our nation, military service is often a family tradition, and these candidates had a father or an uncle or a brother who was a SEAL. They know the culture. They understand the expectations. They aren’t caught off guard by the sacrifices. Second-and soon third-generation SEALs are some of our best performers. But there’s also a flip side to these family traditions, a question we always have to ask recruits with SEAL pedigrees. “Is this your dream—or your father’s?” Whatever the
y say, we’ll learn the truth in training.
And of course we also have people I like to call Proto-SEALs—those rock-hard, Greek-god characters you’d expect to see on a SEAL recruiting poster or maybe a Wheaties box. In many ways, they exemplify the SEAL qualities of strength, pride, honor, and a little battlefield intimidation. Believe me, Achilles, Hector, Ajax, or Alexander the Great didn’t show up on the battlefield with droopy shoulders and beer guts. Their fellow warriors knew immediately a champion was fighting beside them. The enemy knew it, too.
As for me, I always considered myself a SEAL mutt, a mix of several breeds.
This kind of diversity makes us different from many other elite organizations. The vast majority of people could never play in the NBA, even if they worked hard their whole lives to achieve that goal. Almost everyone in that league has a certain height and jumping ability. To be an Olympic swimmer, it really helps to be built like Michael Phelps. There are unyielding genetic requirements in many of these exclusive clubs. That’s not exactly true for us. You can be five foot two, hideously ugly, and still become a Navy SEAL, although I’ve heard from young women over the years how ruggedly handsome they thought my SEAL friends were. My mom certainly noticed when I brought her to the SEAL Christmas party in Coronado, California, one year. All the guys had showered and combed their hair. “That’s a very good-looking, self-assured group of young men,” she said, adding with a laugh: “Have the SEALs ever considered doing one of those beefcake calendars for charity?”
Mom was joking—I think.
But however we get here, it’s an extraordinary individual who even considers entering the SEALs. These young men have all risen above their backgrounds and circumstances and decided they want to take on a challenge they know will be exceedingly hard. For such people, that extreme difficulty is a big part of what makes the challenge such a draw.
Fifteen years ago, I was one of those wannabes.
As senior year rolled along at Syracuse, Churchill’s words were still banging in my head. The future prime minister had gone from serving as an officer in the British Army in India, the Sudan, and South Africa to being the most important statesmen of his generation, rising all the way to 10 Downing Street and leading the United Kingdom through its darkest hours in World War II. He was convinced that his early experiences in the military had uniquely prepared him for all that. I wanted to deposit those kinds of experiences in the bank. That’s how I would build up credit I could withdraw later in life. I knew I had to do my part, as Churchill had, and I was eager to start as soon as possible, before my own life and the rush of events passed me by. For me, as for Churchill, military service was the obvious path. The stakes are the highest. So are the risks. The rewards of my labor might mean not coming home. But protecting my own nation from its outside enemies seemed like the purest form of service. What an honor that would be.
But which branch of service? In what kind of role? I knew I wanted to be an officer, not an enlisted man. From all my years playing sports, I fell naturally into the role of leader—and I thought I was good at it. But it wasn’t as if the young Winston had slapped a sticker on the back cover of My Early Life: “Hey, if you want a life like the British Bulldog’s, here’s who you should call.” He was writing about the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. I was living in America at the turn of the twenty-first. He couldn’t see the challenges ahead for his beloved nation any more than I could see what lay ahead for mine. As we each began to chart our courses, unimagined wars were brewing for both of us—the great world wars for Churchill, the post-9/11 conflicts for me. Neither of us could possibly have predicted the fierceness of those wars, their duration, or their scope. All we could do was be in the right spot and prepare ourselves fully for whatever the future might hold. Churchill had a desire for action, just like I had. We both assumed it would come somehow.
I knew the SEALs were special-operations commandos in the Navy, and they got a lot of respect. I’d heard that the name SEAL was a smash-up of the words SEa, Air, and Land, all the places the SEALs could operate. But I’d never actually met a SEAL. And I certainly didn’t know that in the same speech where President Kennedy vowed that Americans would walk on the moon, he announced an unconventional-warfare initiative that led the Navy to establish a beefed-up counterinsurgency force, staffed initially by combat swimmers from the old Underwater Demolition Teams. That was eleven years before I was born.
When I was seventeen, I’d read a book that was a compilation of four or five stories about special-ops forces—Green Berets, Air Force paratroopers, and Marine snipers, I believe. There was a SEAL story in there, too. It focused on how crafty and mysterious the SEALs were. That intrigued me. My sophomore year in college, I read Rogue Warrior, Richard Marcinko’s riveting account of “the men with green faces,” as the Viet Cong called these crafty American warriors who didn’t follow the usual rules of combat. Marcinko described how tough the Vietnam-era SEALs were, fierce fighters uniquely set off from typical American soldiers. Most of what these commandos did seemed to be shrouded in mystery. That made them even more compelling. I remember thinking, This is cool: a clandestine force of naval frogmen who can sneak out of the water and attack targets onshore, then go back into the water. And not only that, they free-fall from aircraft into dangerous territory and use wild technology and combat arts to get to targets and kill people.
SEALs weren’t just in books, either. It seemed like half the tough guys on 1970s and ’80s TV—Lieutenant Commander Steve McGarrett in Hawaii Five-O, the Tom Selleck character in Magnum, P.I., and on and on—were SEALs or ex-SEALs. Network scriptwriters sure seemed convinced: SEALs were the toughest, shrewdest, most devious, most physical, most expertly trained warriors around, a breed apart from any other commandos you’d want to stack them up against. It was one powerful mythology, and it seemed to have the extra advantage of actually being based in truth.
There were other elite military units I could have joined. But I kept coming back to the idea of the SEALs. They just seemed like the best to me. They were constantly getting into the middle of the action, just as Churchill had. I also liked the idea that the SEALs came from the ocean. The ocean was something I’d grown up around and was totally comfortable with. I’d heard that it might be difficult getting accepted to the SEALs officer training program. But I was determined to try.
As graduation neared at Syracuse, career recruiters kept coming to campus, offering attractive positions in finance, accounting, and various other fields. They told us about how much money we could earn and the great contacts we would make if we went to work somewhere like Wall Street. The Syracuse lacrosse team has a strong alumni network, and those folks seemed eager to help. I tried to be polite. But I had zero desire whatsoever for that career path. I just wanted to be an officer in the SEALs.
When I told my lacrosse teammates what I’d decided, I don’t think any of them even looked up from their video games. They said, “Yeah, that kind of makes sense.” By that point, they knew me pretty well.
Over the years, young guys have asked me many times: How hard is it to be accepted for basic training in the SEALs? Often they are surprised by my response. “Getting through SEAL training is really difficult,” I tell them. “It’s the toughest military-entry program anywhere. But getting in—I don’t want to call it easy, and it’s been getting harder over the years. And it’s nothing compared to what you’re facing once you get there. Want to give it a try?”
There are some basic entry requirements. In general, you have to be a healthy male between eighteen and twenty-eight years old, have vision that can be corrected to 20/25, and be mentally sharp and able to learn. You don’t need to be a trained warrior or a world-class athlete. But you do need to pass our pre-entry Physical Screening Test.
Forty-two push-ups in two minutes, fifty sit-ups in two minutes, six pull-ups with no time limit, a five-hundred-yard pool swim in twelve and a half minutes, and a 1.5-mile, eleven-minute run.
&nbs
p; Be aware of this, though: If you’re just shooting for the bare minimums, you’re approaching this all wrong. It sends the wrong message to an organization that treasures its hard-earned elite status. And if you’re struggling just to reach the minimums, you’ll have an awfully rough time making it through basic SEAL training even if you are invited to try. To be competitive, you really should aim significantly higher than the minimums, even if it means pushing yourself beyond what you thought were your limits.
There are many exercise regimes that can help you get fit. I’m a believer in an open-source program called CrossFit, which is beloved by firefighters, police officers, and quite a few special-forces guys. But in recent years, a whole industry has grown up—books, tapes, websites, and personal-trainer programs, a few of them designed by ex-SEALs. They promise to guide their students toward SEAL-level fitness, whether the user is hoping to join up or to just look like they could. Some of these resources are good, some not. The truth is you don’t need to spend a dime or hire anyone. If you’re looking to become a SEAL, what you should do is get yourself in the best shape possible before you knock on our door.
Instead of just barely passing the Physical Screening test, go for 75–100 push-ups in two minutes, 75–100 sit-ups in two minutes, and a quick burst of 12–25 pull-ups. The lower numbers are considered “average.” The higher numbers are “optimal.” Aim for the higher end of that range—like a SEAL would. And try to get the five-hundred-yard swim in eight to nine minutes and the 1.5-mile run in nine to ten. That way, once you arrive for basic SEAL training, you won’t be spending every last ounce of effort just getting through the physical basics. You’ll have something left in the tank for all the mental and psychological challenges that are absolutely coming. Just arrive healthy, fit, and rested—and ready to go.